The former St. Catherine Indian School, as seen in April 2016. After purchasing the property last year, the Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority is trying to leverage its investment by leasing the property to a movie company for a film. Clyde Mueller/New Mexican file photo
A real estate agent leads a tour of St. Catherine Indian School in 2010. The Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority is working to stabilize some of the historic buildings on the campus. New Mexican file photo
The former St. Catherine Indian School, as seen in April 2016. After purchasing the property last year, the Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority is trying to leverage its investment by leasing the property to a movie company for a film. Clyde Mueller/New Mexican file photo
The former St. Catherine Indian School, as seen in April 2016. Clyde Mueller/New Mexican file photo
The former St. Catherine Indian School, as seen in 2010. New Mexican file photo
A real estate agent leads a tour of St. Catherine Indian School in 2010. The Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority is working to stabilize some of the historic buildings on the campus. New Mexican file photo
The future of the St. Catherine Indian School campus, which was shuttered nearly two decades ago because of financial problems, is still up in the air.
The Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority, which at a foreclosure sale last June purchased the derelict 18-acre property on a hill overlooking Santa Fe’s north side, is considering numerous options while it stabilizes some of the crumbling buildings and secures the site of the school once run by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
“We would like to see something cool happen at this property,” said Ed Romero, executive director of the housing authority, an agency created in 1961 to build and operate low- and moderate-income housing in the city. But Romero said last week that the housing authority will not be ready to talk about actual plans for another six months to a year.
Meanwhile, it is trying to leverage its investment. Last fall, it leased the property to a movie company making a film called Cliffs of Freedom, about a Turkish officer and a young Greek woman on opposite sides of the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century. The film stars several Greek actors, including Simon Kassianides, and well-known U.S. actors, such as Billy Zane, Christopher Plummer, Faye Dunaway and Tania Raymonde.
According to Romero, the company built both a Greek village and a Turkish palace on the site and employed more than 200 people. The movie company might enter into another long-term lease, he said, if it is successful pitching the project as a series.
Since buying the parcel, the housing authority has brought electricity back to the site and is busy cleaning up debris in some of the buildings, removing hazardous material, repairing water leaks and addressing foundation issues. The roof of the old laundry collapsed long ago, and the housing authority has permission from the city to finish demolishing the structure. The movie company also did some asbestos removal and cleanup.
The housing authority put up $300,000 of its own money to purchase the property and has a mortgage with Pueblo Bank and Trust of Pueblo, Colo., for the remaining $1.7 million.
The property went into foreclosure when Max Tafoya’s New Mexico Consolidated Construction Service LLC stopped making mortgage payments to the Pueblo Bank. The bank could not find a buyer for the old campus, although some groups, including the New Mexico School for the Arts, have looked seriously at the property before giving up on the idea of developing it because of cost and restrictions on some of the buildings.
Tafoya’s company paid $4 million for the property in 2005, and the following year the city designated some of the structures as cultural landmarks.
Albuquerque attorney John Polk, who represented Tafoya’s company, said last week that neither he nor Tafoya fully understood the significance of that action. But the result was that “the city prevented us from developing the property in any way. They just squeezed us out. It was well done.”
Tafoya, a cemetery developer, planned to sell the area of the campus known as the ballfield to the Veterans Affairs Department for expansion of the Santa Fe National Cemetery, and develop the rest.
Polk speculated that the housing authority could still get $3 million from the VA for the ballfield, sell the remainder of the property to a developer for $5 million and “walk away with a tidy profit.”
And because it’s five-member board appointed by the mayor, it might have an easier time, Polk suggested.
But Romero said the housing authority has to jump through the same hoops as anyone else. “We’ve never gotten any benefits. We follow the same process,” he said.
The housing authority is considering all possibilities, including developing the property itself. And it has the experience to do so. Last year, for example, it finished two $20 million projects: Santa Fe Community Living, 120 units located at five different sites around the city; and Village in the Bosque, a conversion of 76 units into 98 in Bernalillo. This year it is starting two $15 million projects: rehabs on two senior housing complexes, Villa Hermosa on Luisa Street and Pasatiempo on Alta Vista Street.
The agency is also considering how to engage the community in the project. It has already had discussions with the neighborhood association, although not specifically about future uses.
Polk said he believes the neighborhood association “is going to hit the walls and the ceiling if they put low-income housing” on the old campus site. The most economical thing to do, he said, “is to leave it to medium- to high-income property.”
The housing authority is not against making a profit, Romero said, but one of its goals is to provide low-income housing near downtown Santa Fe. The agency rejected offers from developers for the Villa Alegre property off of West Alameda Street, for example, “because we wanted affordable housing in that part of town.”
It faced a similar situation with its development off Cerro Gordo on the east side. In that case, a developer made a pitch that would have enabled the housing authority to build three times as many units on the west side, but again, Romero said, “that displaces people from desirable areas.”
Pen La Farge, president of the Old Santa Fe Association, said he was not knowledgeable about plans for the property, but “we would certainly like it to be developed so the historic campus is preserved and not allowed to be subject to demolition. It is a wonderful old property and it has some really important historic buildings.”
He added, “This is not going to be cheap.”
The main building on the campus, one of the three largest adobe structures in the state, alone could cost millions of dollars to rehabilitate.
Romero said the housing authority, which already has “a full bucket of things to do,” acknowledges these costs but hopes in the end to “at least get our money back and save this property.”
What it will eventually present to the city that other prospective developers have not, he said, will be a “comprehensive development plan” that accounts for all parts of the historic parcel.
“Our desire is to find a way to save as many [buildings] as possible,” Romero said. “But what that means, we don’t know.”
